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As Olivia Rodrigo promoted her sophomore album Guts, she treaded a careful line. On the one hand: She was grateful and happy for the many successes she’d reaped since her single “Drivers License” went mega-viral in 2021, and she wouldn’t have her life go any other way. On the other hand: Olivia Rodrigo had some anger she wanted to express.
Rodrigo, at 20 years old, has spent much of her young career working in two disparate emotional modes. You might think of them as Disney optimism versus riot grrl angst; child actress Shirley Temple polish versus rock star rage. There’s an A-student earnestness to Rodrigo’s public persona, the sturdy pleasantness of a woman who has been put through the rigors of Disney Channel media training since she was 13. All the same, Rodrigo got famous by scream-singing furiously heartbroken kiss-off anthems to her ex.
“There’s the Olivia who sits across the table from me, carefully balancing avocado toast, awe at her good fortune, pride in what she’s created, gratitude toward the musicians who inspired her, and humility for what she has yet to learn,” said Teen Vogue, summarizing the paradox in 2021. “There’s the Olivia who asks multiple times during our conversation if she’s giving a good answer. Then there’s the Olivia who wrote, ‘Good for you, you’re doing great out there without me, baby! Like a damn sociopath!’”
Yet the more Rodrigo talks about her anger, the more it seems to have in common with her child star precocity, and the more both seem to be drawing from the same well. I’ve started to think Rodrigo’s duality makes most sense if we consider her career under the shadow of a woman who haunts coverage of Rodrigo like a ghost: another Disney star turned pop icon, Britney Spears.
The good student of rock ‘n’ roll
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Olivia Rodrigo became a working actress when she was 11 years old and booked a lead role in an American Girl doll movie. From there she moved to Disney, the hothouse garden of precocious child performers where she would live out her adolescence.
From 2016 to 2019 on the Disney Channel’s Bizaardvark, Rodrigo played an oddball tween vlogger. In 2019, she became the lead on Disney’s meta what-if-Glee-were-sincere High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. The show was a surprise crossover hit on Disney+, and it put Rodrigo on her way to becoming a Gen Z favorite.
Rodrigo was writing songs all the time that she was working, she says, from the age of 8 years old on. She pitched one to the HSM:TM:TS writers room, a heartbreak anthem called “All I Want.” They put it on the show, it took off on TikTok, and all of a sudden, Olivia Rodrigo was an object of interest to the record industry.
Rodrigo picked the label that said it was more interested in her career as a songwriter than as a pop star and started working on a debut album, Sour. In January of 2021, she started releasing singles, and rapidly she became the first artist ever to have their first two singles, and then first three singles, all premiere on the Billboard Top 10. By the time she dropped the full album in May of 2021, Variety had anointed her the voice of her generation. She was still filming High School Musical: The Musical: The Series the whole time.
Sour dropped before Covid vaccines were commonplace, so Rodrigo gamely set about the work of quarantine-era promotion. She did so with a winsome wholesomeness, a palpable determination to stick the landing of the moment. She showed up at her fans’ houses, masked, to prompose to them. She talked about working on her homework so she could graduate high school. She found positive answers to any potentially negative questions she might be asked.
“I love criticism, honestly,” she told Variety. “This is my first album; I’m learning.”
How did she feel when Courtney Love accused her of ripping off a Hole album cover for a photo shoot? “I mean, to be honest I’m flattered that Courtney Love knows who I am.”
How did she feel about the baggage of people thinking of her as a Disney kid? “It’s really cool to be introduced to people for the first time through a song that I feel really passionate about.”
Did it worry her to think about all the Disney kids turned pop stars before her who walked troubled paths? “Oh, ho ho ho, these are hot topics.” This was the rare question Rodrigo declined to answer, on the grounds that she might “get my foot in my mouth” and make people angry. Instead she spoke about how tricky it would be to focus on her budding music career while filming a hit TV show.
She was, the reporter who asked her about Disney would later conclude, “bright with media training.”
Rodrigo’s media training shone all the brighter next to her songs, which were written in an altogether different mode. Although “Drivers License” is a sweeping mid-tempo pop ballad that wouldn’t feel out of place in Taylor Swift’s discography, Sour as an album is thick with the grungy guitars and outraged pout of riot grrl rock. “Brutal,” the teen angst anthem on the first track, lands like a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of the pop music gods: Oh, so you thought we were all over punk now? Think again! Where’s my fucking teenage dream?
“She’s Trojan-horsing in rock’s musical brashness and emotional spikiness under the cover of pop stardom,” the New York Times concluded of Rodrigo in 2023. She was “pop’s brightest new hope,” the headline added, but still, she “just may be a rock star.”
It was an odd combination: furious on records, precocious and eager to please in interviews. It would continue.
According to early reviews, Guts is more rock and roll than Sour was. “Although there is some of her trademark balladry on Guts, it mostly features tart, agitated rock that draws from British indie (Wet Leg), US alternative (Beck, Smashing Pumpkins) and the feminist punk that Rodrigo’s mum introduced her to as a kid (the Waitresses). (A good student, again),” writes the Guardian. That parenthetical points to one of the things that’s so striking about Rodrigo’s use of rock: She rocks out like a good student.
Rodrigo grew up on rock, specifically grunge, alt, and riot grrl. That was her parents’ music, and Rodrigo embraced it with what Vogue describes as the energy of “a bubbly and precocious go-getter.” As an 8-year-old at a talent show, she sang “Home Sweet Home” by Mötley Crüe. Rock is less a rebellion for her than it is a homecoming.
Still, Rodrigo has also made it clear that part of rock’s attraction is its ability to let her express her anger. She told Teen Vogue in 2021 that songwriting was “a way to talk about what isn’t socially acceptable, unraveling in a way she wouldn’t do in person.”
“Something I’m really proud of is that this record talks about emotions that are hard to talk about or aren’t really socially acceptable especially for girls: anger, jealousy, spite, sadness, they’re frowned-upon as bitchy and moaning and complaining or whatever,” she told the Guardian the same year. “But I think they’re such valid emotions.” Well, sure: It’s brutal out here. Even if you love criticism.
So where does this good student get her anger? Let’s go back to those “hot topics” she skirted before.
Britney Spears’s long shadow
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The thing about Rodrigo that her profilers all get excited to talk about is that she’s living out one of pop culture’s most notorious tropes: Disney kid to pop star.
“The road from Disney girl to pop artist is one of the most treacherous in the industry, studded with traps and pitfalls involving control, impossible expectations, the brute-force monetization of girlishness and sexuality,” wrote Jia Tolentino in her Vogue profile of Rodrigo. “There have been mini-epochs, each micro-generation of girls getting a little less flattened in the machine: phase one, Britney Spears; phase two, Hilary Duff; phase three, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus; and in phase four, Ariana Grande—the first to quickly shed the Disney mantle and establish an independent musical identity.”
Grande, though, was not a Disney kid. She was a Nickelodeon kid, which is perhaps why she was able to transition from child star to adult so quickly. It’s Rodrigo who truly represents phase four of the Disney girls. Unlike the phase three girls, Rodrigo declined to do brand-friendly radio pop at Disney’s Hollywood Records. Instead, she got a contract with a major label — and her own identity.
Rodrigo’s rapid-fire exit from the Disney brand sets her apart from her most recent predecessors. It also links her intimately with the Disney girl who had, depending on how you squint, both the hardest and the easiest time establishing her own identity after singing for the Mouse: Britney Spears. Spears’s first album was a sensation on the level of Sour when it dropped in 1999. It distanced her firmly from her past life as a Mouseketeer, but it’s an open question just how much Spears has ever been in charge of her own identity.
“Not since Britney Spears had a former Disney star come to dominate pop culture so suddenly,” observed the Guardian in 2023. Characteristically, though, Rodrigo was “a good student of her predecessors,” which meant she “managed her supercharged ascent with striking caution.” That is, after all, what all the media training was for.
The good student wasn’t above an explicit homage or two, though. In the video for “Brutal,” she dons a Roberto Cavalli dress that Britney Spears wore to the 2003 American Music Awards. “Who am I if not exploited?” she sings, dressed as the pop princess whose complete exploitation has only gradually become clear to the rest of the world.
Rodrigo has always been clear that her parents didn’t push her to go into show business, and that they periodically urged her to consider taking a break so she could have a normal adolescence. Being a child star, she says, was always her own idea. Still, she has expressed a certain amount of ambivalence about her career. She told the Guardian this year that when she turned 20, she found herself overwhelmed by sadness: “Like, ‘Oh shit, I worked my whole childhood and I’m never going to get it back.’”
She’s also suggested that she’s discomforted to find herself continually mining her darkest moments for her career. “I could do a chart of like, when I’m the saddest and when I write the songs that make the most money,” she told the New York Times this year, adding that she’d discussed the issue a fair amount with her therapist.
Rodrigo comes off as blandly polished and wholesome in interviews because she’s a former Disney kid. She comes off as furious in her music also, perhaps, because she’s a former Disney kid.
“I’ve experienced a lot of emotional turmoil over having all these feelings of rage and dissatisfaction that I felt like I couldn’t express, especially in my job,” she said in the Guardian in 2023. “I’ve always felt like: you can never admit it, be so grateful all the time, so many people want this position. And that causes a lot of repressed feelings. I’ve always struggled with wanting to be this perfect American girl and the reality of not feeling like that all the time.”
Spears at the height of her career was considered the all-American girl; the first track of Rodrigo’s new album is titled “All-American Bitch.”
Britney Spears was not able to express her anger for most of her career: her anger for her lost childhood, at the paparazzi who stalked her, at the family who monetized and controlled her talent. When she did, the results were so explosive that she would become, forever after, one of the cautionary tales that all child stars are taught to learn from: Here’s what can happen if you spiral out of control. “I’m so angry it’s insane,” Spears said in her court testimony in 2021.
Rodrigo, good student of her predecessors, has finagled more control over her music and image than Spears apparently had. She can put her anger in her songs. But you can see the ghost of Britney lingering over the precise and pleasant caution with which she talks about her anger in public.
“It’s just really hard to be a kid and an actor, and you can feel maybe a little taken advantage of sometimes,” she said in the Guardian this year. “The responsibility, feeling criticised in public, feeling like you have to work so much and you see your friends who can go to pool parties and hang out, and you’re stuck on set.” But, she insisted, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
The rage of Rodrigo’s music suggests she might not be telling the complete truth there. But she’s got decades of evidence to suggest that expressing any anger to the media would be a bad idea.
If she puts it in a song, though? Fuck it, it’s fine.
